


Freckle

by starbolin



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cancer, F/M, M/M, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:47:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starbolin/pseuds/starbolin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody dies in this story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freckle

Stiles is half-asleep after his second orgasm, sprawled out on the top bunk in his cramped dorm room, when Derek finally tracks the odd scent down to his left calf, low down on the inside, near the ankle.

He lifts Stiles’s leg and puts his nose against it.

“Tickles,” Stiles mumbles without opening his eyes.

Derek ignores him and sniffs some more, tightening his hand around Stiles’s ankle when Stiles halfheartedly tries to pull his leg away. Finally, Derek withdraws his nose from Stiles’s skin and looks.

There’s a little mole peeping through the pale brown hairs of Stiles’s calf. It looks like the dozens of others scattered over his skin. Smaller than many of them, actually. Practically a freckle.

Derek sniffs it again.

“Seriously, Derek, what are you doing,” Stiles says.

Derek puts the calf down and crawls up Stiles’s body, kisses his sleepy mouth and puts his hands in Stiles’s hair. He likes it this way, grown out. He likes being able to put his fingers in it, tilt Stiles’s face for his kisses.

.

They’ve been fucking, off and on, for just over a year. Sometimes Stiles comes to Beacon Hills for the weekend; sometimes Derek visits him at college, sneaks into his dorm room after curfew and strolls out with him the next morning -- or afternoon. Whenever Stiles has to go to class. 

Once in awhile they get a hotel room, and Stiles accidentally yells or knocks something over or kicks out against the wall, calls breathlessly, “Sorry whoever’s next door,” laughing even as Derek fucks him, sucks him, strokes him, pushes back against him.

The first time they did it, Stiles was seventeen years and ten months old, and they were both dappled with someone else’s blood. Derek found little black flakes of it in his bedsheets the next morning, smeared reddish-brown in the places where he and Stiles had sweated. Where they’d come. Derek still has the sheets, and the stains are very faint now, faded to a near-invisible freckling of pale brown.

He knows Stiles fucks other people -- sometimes Stiles tells him about them, and sometimes Derek just smells them. It’s okay; so does Derek.

.

“So I went to a dermatologist,” Stiles says when Derek picks up, and Derek stops lifting the kettle ball immediately, switches the phone to his other ear and sets the weight on the floor, because he can hear something strange in Stiles’s voice. Something wrong. “It’s, um. You know that mole?”

“Yeah,” Derek says, and his voice sounds normal, that’s good.

“Yeah, uh.” Stiles laughs a little. It’s not a very funny laugh. “Well, it’s.”

“It’s what,” Derek says. His breathing is very even. His fingernails are blunt and entirely human.

“Melanoma,” Stiles says. 

It’s a really pretty word. It sounds like an Italian dessert. A butterfly.

.

The next time Stiles calls, Erica is there with him. 

Sometimes Stiles fucks Erica. Or, more accurately, Erica fucks Stiles. Derek knows Erica’s pretty much always the one doing the fucking, no matter what physical act is taking place.

Once in awhile, if she’s horny and no one interesting comes into the club where she tends bar, she’ll come home and crawl all over Derek, complaining and shaking her head to tickle him with her hair, until he sighs and goes down on her. She likes fingers inside when she comes the second time, anterior pressure to make her feel full. If she decides she wants to go for three, he puts one in her ass too.

She goes to see Boyd sometimes, out in Nevada, tossing an overnight bag into her little lilac Brio. She doesn’t fuck him; his pack wouldn’t like it.

Stiles tells Derek he’s seeing a specialist. Discussing options. He’s still covered by his dad’s insurance, which is good, apparently.

“Aren’t you really young for this?” Derek feels helpless, panicked and stupid with the vast sweep of what he doesn’t know about human sickness.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. “I mean, it doesn’t happen very often. But it happens.”

Derek makes him hand the phone to Erica. He stumbles through three different attempts to say _are you taking good care of him, please take good care of him_ without actually saying that, or anything similar to that.

“He’s fine,” Erica says; she’s been speaking Derek for years. “He doesn’t feel sick at all. That’s not really how it works.”

It’s almost funny. Like Derek is feeling sick for both of them.

.

Erica has to go back to work, and Stiles calls Derek on a Friday night that’s more like a Saturday morning. He’s stoned and he sounds scared.

“I just, I really need to not die from cancer,” Stiles says. 

Derek has to keep reminding himself to relax his hand. Phones are expensive. He has the money, but still. 

Stiles laughs. Sort of laughs. “I mean obviously. That’s -- like, I’m sure everybody probably feels that way, I’m not -- it’s just.” Derek can hear Stiles’s throat clicking, dry and rough from the joint. “My dad.”

A few months ago, when Stiles was slightly drunk off of disgusting anise-smelling liquor, he told Derek that his mother had spent about two months dying, and that he still hadn’t made up his mind whether he wished it had taken half of that or ten times as long.

“Stiles,” he says. “If you want -- I know you don’t want -- but if--”

Derek has asked Stiles to take the bite twice. 

First was a week after they’d fucked, and Stiles rolled his eyes and said, “No thanks.”

Second was six months ago, in the front seat of the Camaro, and Stiles groaned, “No.” He was shaking and clutching at Derek’s biceps, head tipped back against the seat and one leg over Derek’s shoulder to open him up to Derek’s fingers.

“I want you, I want you to run with me,” Derek panted into the hollow of Stiles’s throat, folding Stiles’s thigh back into an even more impossible stretch as he pressed his chest closer, fluttering his fingers and feeling Stiles’s heartbeat throb in the plush heat of Stiles’s ass. He set his teeth against Stiles’s skin and said, muffled and wild, “Let me.”

“No,” Stiles said. “If you bite me, this is over. I’ll kill you and I’ll tell my dad to arrest you and I’ll never fuck you again.”

Derek released a desperate, miserable growl into Stiles’s hair.

“Put your cock in me,” Stiles said. “Give me it, I want it,” and Derek had.

Over the phone, stoned and trying not to sound scared, Stiles says, “I haven’t told my dad or Scott. Just you. And Erica.”

Scott is out of state on a sports scholarship. He’s studying child psychopathology. He’s not an exceptional student, but it’s not going to matter. All of his bull-headed frustration and impulsiveness have settled into easy grace and humor. He listens carefully, and speaks kindly.

There's a rustle of cloth through Stiles's end of the phone. “I'm still looking at options, nothing’s decided yet.”

“Okay,” Derek says.

“But if --” Stiles is quiet for a long time. Derek wants to say something to interrupt whatever lonely thought spiral Stiles is lost in, but he can’t think of the right thing. Finally, Stiles gets himself started again. “I just wanted to make sure to check on all of them. My options.”

“I’m here,” Derek says. He means, _I’m so fucking sorry this is happening to you._ He also means, _I’m here._

.

Stiles’s third biopsy shows cancer in the surrounding lymph nodes.

Derek doesn’t look where he’s going and sprains his ankle while running in the woods. It feels good. He runs on it while it heals, barely slowing down.

Erica goes to see Melissa McCall at the hospital and comes home with pamphlets about chemotherapy, lymph node removal, oedema, pressure garments.

.

On Friday, Stiles skips his classes and takes the Greyhound to Beacon Hills. Derek is at the station thirty minutes early; the bus is thirty minutes late. He turns his coat collar up against the chill of autumn drizzle while he waits and carefully doesn’t think about anything much.

“You should do it while we have sex.” Stiles stands at the counter, balancing on one foot like a stork as he lays slices of organic avocado onto a toasted poppyseed bagel. Derek went to Trader Joe’s last night and bought everything he could remember Stiles liking. He spent $128.96 and in the parking lot, he put his head down on the steering wheel and trembled, feeling terrified, and excited, and nauseated, and guilty. Stiles licks avocado off of his thumb and says, “That’s what you wanted before.”

“I don’t -- that’s okay,” Derek says behind him, stomach tight. “I’d rather do it how you want.”

Stiles holds a slice of cheese over his shoulder for Derek to eat. “Maybe that’s how I want.”

.

Stiles is braced over Derek, and Derek is grabbing at the muscles of Stiles’s back and shoulders so that he doesn’t reach for his own erection, even though he’s so ready to come he’s shuddering and deep, ugly, heaving groans are being pushed out of his chest every time Stiles thrusts into him. 

A drop of sweat rolls down Stiles’s temple from his hair and splashes on Derek’s lips, salty and hot. Derek flicks his tongue out to taste it better.

“You should do it soon,” Stiles says. "While you come."

“I don’t -- want -- to hurt you,” Derek manages with the rhythm of their bodies.

Stiles braces himself on one arm and pushes his other against Derek’s open mouth. He says, “Do it.”

.

On Saturday, Stiles opens his eyes and says, “I can hear your heart from right here.”

“Yeah,” Derek says.

“It’s really,” Stiles trails off into a long silence, then blinks hard, irises returning to clear honey brown. “It’s really something.”

Derek wonders whether Stiles can hear it speeding up.

.


End file.
